Angel rested himself on one knee. "Look, I'm just a guy who is on hand to look for things. I'm the scout at the head of the cavalry column. I report what I see and leave it to others to sort it out. . . ."
"But . . . ?" Norton prompted him.
"But from all my years in black ops, I've learned that it ain't just like the movies—it's
worse
than the movies. The layers go deeper than you can imagine. And I just think that someone somewhere is obviously pulling some strings here. I mean, they
knew
you were coming. You can't argue against that. Everyone back at Seven Ghosts was pissing their pants about security—so much so they didn't even tell you guys what was up until after you shipped. Yet the whole show was compromised somehow."
Thirty seconds of absolute silence went by. There were no cries on the breeze now. No shooting stars. Even the wind stopped blowing.
"Bastards," Delaney finally whispered. "If this is even half true, I'll kill anyone who put us in this position."
Norton was just shaking his head. "But this still doesn't make sense," he said. "Why would they have to drag us all the way over here just to make it look like we killed those guys in a botched rescue attempt? I mean, we were at war with the Iraqis ten years ago—we're
still
at war with them in one sense. Why would they be so shy about icing a bunch of Americans? Or more to the point, icing them but shifting the blame?"
Angel just took a deep breath. "Maybe you're just assuming the people behind this are Iraqi," he said.
Those words hit Norton on the head like an anvil. He looked up at Angel.
"Well, damn it, we're
in
Iraq, and this fucking airplane has been operating
out
of Iraq, so how in hell can the Iraqis
not
be involved?" he asked.
"Oh, they're involved," Angel said. "But probably not the way we think. They're just hired hands in all this, I'll bet. Just like you. Just like me."
At that moment they all heard an odd beeping sound. It quickly turned into a piercing shrill. Angel took a device out of his pocket. It looked like a TV remote control.
"I hope I've helped you two in some way," Angel said. "And if I just made things more confusing, I'm sorry. But one last piece of advice: Whatever you do, let's keep this little conversation just between us girls, OK?"
His device beeped again.
"Now I really gotta go," he concluded.
The two pilots just stared back at him.
"You gotta go?" Delaney said. "Go where? How?"
Angel smirked. "You guys can do one of two things," he said. "You can go back into the cave and not see what's about to happen. Or you can hang around out here, get the fright of your life—and then walk around for the next twenty years wondering if someone is going to pop you because you've seen something you shouldn't."
Delaney was almost laughing now.
"Why do I have the feeling I'm in the middle of a bad spy novel?" he asked with frustration.
Angel smiled. "Because you are," he said.
With that he punched some buttons on his device and the beeping became more frequent.
Suddenly Norton became aware of a bright light over their heads. This was no shooting star. It was burning bright blue.
Then
he realized it was getting bigger. Then he realized it was actually descending towards them at a high rate of speed.
For one frightening moment he was sure this was a missile of some kind heading right for the cave. He instinctively threw Delaney and himself to the ground. There was a great rush of wind and dust—and maybe some laughter too. Norton just covered up and waited for the sound of the gut-wrenching explosion to come.
But it never did.
*****
That was how Smitz found them not ten seconds later. Lying face-down, hands over their heads.
"What
the fuck
are you two doing?" he asked them with much exasperation.
"Getting some air," Delaney snapped back. They both scrambled to their feet, looking in every direction for any sign of Angel—and finding none.
"Mind telling me what's happening out here?" Smitz asked them. "You two going round the bend together?"
The two pilots stayed tight-lipped.
"You need us for something?" Norton finally asked him.
Smitz just stared back at them. "Yes, I do," he said. "Please get your asses back into the cave."
He started to walk away.
"What for?" Delaney challenged him.
Smitz stopped and slowly turned around.
"What for?" he asked bewildered. "We've got to help Ricco and Gillis—that's what for."
He began to walk away again.
"Help them with what?" Delaney called after him. Neither he or Norton had moved a muscle.
Smitz was not having a good day. He spun around this time, his face growing red.
"Do you remember what Contingency #2 is, Delaney?"
"Tell us again," Delaney said.
Smitz looked at them strangely.
"The Pumper?" he snapped. "Mutt and Jeff have to do their refuel rendezvous in one hour, remember?"
"Then what?" Delaney pressed him. "What are your immediate plans after that?"
Smitz was stumped. Why were they acting like this?
"I've decided our immediate plans are to get the hell out of here," he said. "If that's OK with you and your girlfriend here?"
Delaney looked over at Norton, who just shrugged.
"Yeah," Delaney finally said. "That's OK with us."
*****
Ten minutes later, Norton and Delaney were part of a large team that was pushing the enormous Hook fuel chopper out of the cave opening.
It was not unlike pushing a tractor-trailer truck with a full cargo bay from a dead stop. Of course it would have been harder if the chopper was filled with fuel, but after the long flight to and from the raid site, plus the ingress journey itself, the copter's fuel bladders were nearly empty. Thus the rendezvous mission called for under Contingency #2.
If it was possible, Norton and Delaney were pushing the hardest on the huge bird. They had silently agreed not to mention to anyone the strange meeting they'd just had out on the cliff's edge. Who would believe them if they did? They had no clue how the guy called Angel had been able to find them, land on the mountain, and depart again so quickly, so silently. And as he himself had warned them, they didn't want to know.
Added to this the chilling message he left with them: that the operation had been compromised by either someone very high up or someone very close to it. After the day's tragic events, it was all getting just a little bit too much to bear.
So, at the moment, their combined frame of mind was focused on just one thing: to get the hell out of their present situation. The harder they pushed, the sooner Ricco and Gills could take off, make their rendezvous, come back with the fuel, and make that dream a reality. That was why Norton and Delaney were sweating like madmen.
It was also why, when the chopper was finally out on the huge ledge, Norton felt the urge to warn the tanker pilots not to delay in the performance of their mission.
"Don't waste any time up there, OK?" he yelled up to them.
Ricco looked out the cockpit window back down at him.
"What are you? An asshole?" he yelled to Norton.
With that, they began the process of getting their huge engines going.
Chou did a quick check of his picket line; an electronic sweep of the area said no one was around. He gave the Hook's pilots the signal and seconds later, the engines exploded and the rotor blades began spinning.
There were some last-minute checks, but finally the air techs gave Ricco the thumbs-up. The pilot hit the throttles and the huge beast started ascending, creating a great storm of dust and sand in its wake.
The Hook rose nearly straight up into the night sky. No nav lights, just the exhaust and the flare from the engines indicating its position. Very soon it was hardly visible at all.
Delaney was standing next to Norton, braving the dust storm and watching the chopper disappear into the starry night. Soon they couldn't even hear it anymore.
"You know something," Delaney said, resignation thick in his voice.
"What's that?"
"If those guys fuck up up there," he said, "then we're really fucked down here. No matter what Angel told us. No fuel. No way to get out. No way to even get down from this goddamn mountain. And if what Angel said
is
right, there's no way they'll ever send anyone out here to get us."
Norton shielded his eyes against the bright moonlight, trying in vain to see the last image of the Hook flying away.
"My thoughts exactly," he said.
On a playground near Rye, New Hampshire, nine-year-old Ryan Gillis was playing baseball all by himself.
It was early evening. A Friday. The sun was setting. It was still hot. Ryan was hitting the ball off the end of the bat, trying to get it to go straight up in the air. Whenever he was successful in doing this, he would hurriedly put on his glove and attempt to catch the ball as it was coming back down. In thirty minutes of trying, he'd accomplished this complicated feat exactly twice.
All this would have been easier if he had someone to play catch with—God knows he needed the practice. But these days, Ryan had been practicing mostly by himself.
Tomorrow was a big day for him. At noon, he would be playing in his first ever Little League game. He hadn't slept much just thinking about it. Ever since the coach told him Wednesday that for Saturday's game Ryan would be in right field for Susan Mantosh because she was getting fitted for braces, his heart hadn't stopped pounding. He'd made sure his mother had washed and pressed his unused uniform—
twice
. He'd bought new socks with his own paper route money, and had scrubbed his sneakers clean more than a half-dozen times in the past two days. He knew to play good, he had to look good. Or at least that was what his coach always told him.
Early Friday night was usually the time he and his father played catch. It was only that Dad had spent hours playing toss with him that he'd been good enough to make the Wickes Hardware Junior Tigers in the first place, even if it was as a benchwarmer. Now, Ryan would have given anything to have Dad see him start his first real game.
But Dad was not home these days.
Just around the time he'd gotten out of school for summer vacation, his mother told him Dad would be away for two weeks. At first Ryan thought no more about it. He knew his father was a big shot with the Air National Guard. He was away for two weeks a lot. But Dad had been away for more than a month now—and Mom told him the night before she wasn't sure now when he'd be coming home.
Where was he? Mom just didn't know. She guessed that maybe he was overseas, on a very special mission, picked especially by the President. How cool would that be? Ryan thought. But when he told the neighborhood kids this, they just laughed at him. Air National Guard guys never went on special missions, the kids said. They were just guys who cleaned up after the real soldiers.
And after a while, Ryan started to believe them.
*****
The helicopter first began sputtering somewhere over the Shawar region of Iraq.
Ricco and Gillis groaned at the same time when they first heard the disturbing noise. They were ten minutes away from crossing over the coastline to the Persian Gulf. If trouble was coming, they would much rather be over solid ground—helicopters usually sank quicker than airplanes, and they certainly did not want to go down in the Gulf without the opportunity of sending out a distress call. But their orders said they had to maintain radio silence, no matter what. And this they would do.
The first real indication of trouble came about twenty minutes after taking off from the Bat Cave. The electrical output monitor had started fluctuating. Their control panel lights began blinking, with some losing function for as long as a minute or two. These were worrisome things—but not enough to force them to turn back.
But then, just as the coastline came into view north of Basra, their oil pressure gauge indicated a 20-percent drop. And the sputtering began.
Then they began to smell smoke.
"Damn," Gillis whispered, strangely. "My kid's playing Little League today."
Ricco didn't even hear him. He was pushing buttons and throwing switches—and making sure the copter's engines were still working right. They were. But they sounded awful.
"Shit, now what?" Ricco was saying more to himself than anything else. This was a real problem. Up to this point, the big Russian chopper had performed nearly flawlessly. Since that first flight from Seven Ghosts, through all the drilling, through the voyage here and the transit to the cliff cave, to the refueling after the raid, the Hook had not given them one whit of trouble.
But now, on their most important mission, the thing had decided to get cranky.
"We still have adequate pressure and adequate juice," Gillis reported, doing a quick diagnostic scan of their controls. "I say we continue."
Ricco just shook his head in disgust. "What other choice do we have? We got to pick up the gas just to get ourselves back to the cave. We ain't got enough to go back, fix this thing, then come out and meet the tanker again."
"Unless we just land near someplace friendly," Gillis said under his breath.
Ricco ignored him because he knew his partner didn't mean it. At least, he hoped he didn't.
They flew on, Ricco doing the piloting, Gillis watching the small laptop that was serving as their navigation system. In ten minutes they were over the deep waters of the Gulf and approaching the rendezvous point—five minutes too early.
This was not a good thing.
"Our gas is so low we must have a fuel leak somewhere," Ricco said, tapping the fuel gauge readout, hoping it would suddenly show more fuel.
Suddenly both of them knew just how valuable they'd been when they were out looking for lost and drained airplanes over the Atlantic. It was not a pleasant feeling to be on the other end.
"Christ," Ricco said, "We're at half reserves. If this keeps up, we might not have any choice but to get our feet wet."
"Not to worry," Gillis said, his voice suddenly calm. "Our friends are here."
Ricco looked up and sure enough, he could see the navigation lights of the refueling tanker. It was a Marine C-130, about a mile ahead and maybe a thousand feet above them, breaking out of a huge cumulous cloud. There were red lights all over it. They began blinking. It was a beautiful sight.
But now came the hard part. Ricco and Gillis had hooked up many times with C-130's during their night drills. But never under real conditions. Essentially, their most important role in the whole mission came down to what they would do in the next five minutes.
They began a series of blinking light signals with the C-130. Altitude, flight speed, and so on were transmitted between the two aircraft. Once all these things were out of the way, the refueling could begin in earnest.
The long snake-like hose began unreeling from the C-130's left wing. Ricco managed to twist the chopper to line up with the fuel hose.
"OK, I need your eyeballs now, Gilly," Ricco said. "Guide me in."
"OK," Gillis said, eyes glued on the hose as they drew closer to it. "Up a hair. Over . . . left. Good! Stay. Whoops—go up. A little. Little more. There! That's it. You're golden."
The fuel hose was now right above their heads. Their receptacle was four feet behind their line of sight, but it had a long spout on it and with a jerk of a controls, Ricco slammed the probe into the end of the hose.
"Contact!" Gillis yelled out. The series of green lights popping up on his control window confirmed they were hooked.
Ricco began flipping governor switches now. When they got a clear-flow situation-lamp light, they would know they were ready to take on gas. The light blinked on a second later. Ricco began flashing his nav lights madly. The C-130 pilots flashed theirs in return. A moment later gas began flowing through the
C-130's hose into the Hook's receptacle, through the temporary piping, and into the fuel bladders in the back of the huge chopper.
That was when the chopper started sputtering again.
"Sheeeet!" Gillis cursed. "This is not good. . . ."
Suddenly the chopper was all over the sky.
"We're losing power in the left plant!" Gillis yelled to Ricco.
The chopper was now tipping out of balance.
"Damn! The left engine is failing!" Gillis yelled.
Ricco didn't reply. He was too busy trying to hold the chopper steady and hooked to the fuel hose.
"Can this thing fly on just one engine?" Gillis was asking.
They weren't sure.
Now another problem. They could both smell the stink of gas. This was enough to make Ricco take his eyes off the hose hookup and look over at Gillis. There was terror on his partner's face. Fumes were filling the cockpit very rapidly now. But where were they coming from?
"Either one of the fuel bladders is leaking," Gillis said, answering the question before it was asked, "or we got fuel coming out of the failing left-side engine."
"You gotta go check!" Ricco yelled back over to him.
Gillis was already unstrapping from his seat. With the slightest electrical spark, they'd both be blown to Kingdom Come—and probably take the C-130 tanker with them.
Gillis had to crawl back into the rear of the huge chopper on his hands and knees, so violently was the big Hook bouncing all over the sky. Using his penlight, he checked the bladders both front and back. They were slowly filling with the gas from the C-130, just as they were supposed to. The fumes were very thick back here, but he could see no leaks in either of the two huge gas bags.
This was not good. Gillis began crawling back to the cockpit. He'd wished the bags
were
leaking instead of the gas smell coming from the engines. If they had a fuel leak in the power plants, the possibility of an explosion increased about tenfold.
Gillis had trouble getting back into his seat, that was how much the big chopper was jumping all over the sky now. He looked at the fuel-take-on meter and saw they were only halfway through the refueling. The smell of gas was so bad, and the engines' power dropping so quickly, he couldn't imagine them surviving this flight.
"Should we disconnect?" Ricco yelled over to him.
"We've only taken on five hundred pounds," Gillis yelled back. "That's nowhere near enough. We've got to hang with it!"
So that was what they did. They stayed on course, took on gas for the unit, all the while waiting for the bright flash and the searing flames that would so horribly end their lives.
But it never came. The next two minutes passed like an eternity, but finally, the bladders had reached their full point. Now came the tricky part: disengaging. Ricco started easing the chopper away by reducing throttle. With the precision of a surgeon, he gently began extracting their receptacle probe from the fuel hose.
But then Gillis saw a bright flash off to their right. For a moment he thought he was seeing double. Suddenly he realized there was another plane next to the tanker. Another plane that looked just like it.
Another C-130 . . .
There was another flash. Then another. And another.
It was on that third flash that Gillis finally realized what was going on.
"Damn!" he yelled. "It's the freaking ArcLight!"
Ricco looked up and sure enough, saw the ghostly black gunship riding right next to the refueling tanker. Its guns were blazing away at it.
"Christ!
Disconnect!
" Gillis was yelling.
Purely on reaction, Ricco hit the full-disengage button. The Hook's receptacle opened up and the tanker's fuel hose came out, spraying aviation gas everywhere.
The tanker blew up an instant later.
The explosion was blinding. All Gillis could see were pieces of metal and wire and glass flying right at him, all of it on fire.
Somehow Ricco was able to pitch the big chopper away from the gigantic fireball. But it was a very violent maneuver. The fuel bags went one way and the chopper went another, and soon they were looking straight down at the Persian Gulf rushing up at them.
"This is not good!" Gillis was yelling out.
Ricco was battling the controls, but it was already hopeless. The Hook was falling way too fast and weighed too much to get under control.
They'd lost all sight of the ArcLight by now. The sky around them was filled with the burning debris of the C-130 tanker plane. And they were falling with it, very rapidly.
It was strange then, because Ricco just looked over at Gillis and extended his hand. Gillis took it and shook it heartily.
"Sorry, buddy," Ricco said. "I really am. . . ."
Gillis just shook his head as the Hook went nose-over.
"Not your fault, pal," he said calmly. "Not at all . . ."